§111. The Investigation of Things

There is an experiential element in the Confucians' approach to classical learning, an effort to retrieve sage experience and meld it with the present. They are cautious about the senses, but would not forsake them; the problem is to use them well, and especially not to get stuck in them, never forgetting the continuity and reciprocity of events that ordinary people with ordinary perception overlook.

Another strain of Confucian empiricism appears in the Greater Learning (Da xue), a text piously attributed to the founder but probably from the school of Mencius in the mid-third century bce. In the Song dynasty, more than a thousand years later, it was folded into the so-called Four Books, which became the foundation of Confucian education thereafter. In the opening lines it is said, “The ancients, in wishing to manifest luminous virtue in the world... first extended their knowledge (zhi) to the limit. Extending knowledge to the limit lies in investigating things (ge wu). Investigate things and then knowledge is perfected.”⁹⁶

To Western ears and in translation, the expression “the investigation of things” sounds like a call to empirical inquiry. We get a hint of what the Chinese hear in it from the influential explanation provided by the Song dynasty commentator Zhu Xi. “If we wish to extend our knowledge to the limit, this involves approaching things and thoroughly investigating their principle (li)” The word “principle” is his contribution. With it he canonizes innovations by Cheng Yi from the beginning of Song Confucianism. Zhu's commentary cites Cheng: “In all activities there are principles; to arrive at principles is the investigation of things”⁹⁷

As I understand it, the investigation of principle investigates not truth but right use, the right way to handle things, how best to accommodate them in the collective economy of “all under Heaven” (tian xia).

Their perfected person would be to be able to understand, for anything one might confront (as an official, say), how it fits with “all under Heaven” This fit defines a thing's “function” (yong), and understanding that is inval­uable for the problem of how best to interact with it, which is what the in­vestigation of principle investigates. To investigate principle is to investigate continuity, the relations of things together. With continuity discerned, paths open around obstacles. Everything under Heaven is continuous, everything made consistent by the action of principle, which our heart is predisposed to discern provided the effort is sincere.

This li-principle is not the Platonic Idea with which it has been incau­tiously compared. The li dissolve divisions, scatter immobility, and restore the continuity of things superficially discontinuous. To investigate things is to see past obvious differences and common evaluations, and apprehend the resonant interpenetration of things. This is not to contemplate the Ideas of Plato's Heaven, timeless, self-identical forms closed under the idea of the Good. The neo-Confucian system is one of continuity, not identity; move­ment, not closure; change, not presence, and how to live with change, not rise beyond it.

The finality of this investigation is sagacious action in the common world, for which the empirical details Plato scorns cannot be overlooked. Cheng explains the telos of investigating things: to “understand everything—at one extreme, the height of heaven and the thickness of earth, at the other, why a single thing is as it is.” Luo Qinshun, a Ming dynasty advocate of Cheng's neo-Confucianism, writes, “What is of value in the investigation of things is precisely one's desire to perceive the unity of principle in all of its diverse particularizations. Only when there is neither subject nor object, neither de­ficiency nor surplus, and one has truly achieved unity and convergence, does one speak of knowledge being complete. This is also called knowing where to rest.”⁹⁹

It would be a mistake of another kind to interpret the Confucian “inves­tigation of things” on the Western model of empirical research. The investi­gation of things does not seek the solution to problems of knowledge under discussion in a research community. Training in Confucian investigation should make one accomplished in apprehending the relations of things to­gether, as proved by sagacious action. That is what investigating principle cultivates, although the “things” to be investigated include books as much as nature. All experience, from books to nature, from words of the sages to per­sonal history, is material for “the investigation of things.” The classics provide templates, and investigating things is really just a deeper experience of the classics, not the inquiry of European empiricism. To interact with everything under heaven as masterfully as the ancient sages did, we have to study their works, which are a record of their experience. We have to strive to under­stand living experience in terms of what we have learned from the classics.

Needham drew a different conclusion. He says that for “the past thou­sand years Chinese scholars concerned with the investigation of nature have taken the words [ge wu, investigation of things] to apply to scientific studies more or less in our modern sense, and...

This work remains a widely used reference of traditional Chinese medi­cine both in China and the diaspora. Each medical substance is treated in a systematic article under two rubrics, the first being Physiological Activity, chiefly concerning the ailments it cures, with the second rubric, Appended Prescriptions, detailing preparation and dosage for specific disorders. To organize his material Li devised a thorough reclassification of medical substances, describing his effort to rectify pharmaceutical nomenclature as a Confucian “rectification of names” (zheng ming). He chastises the lack of rigor in earlier work, and claims to have engaged in evidential research (kao zheng), analytical procedures (fen bie), and synthesizing operations (gui bing), exertions he epitomizes as a Confucian investigation of things. “By doing research and explaining their nature and principle (xing li), I have ac­tually practiced what we Confucian scholars call ‘investigation of things' (ge wu zhi xue).”¹⁰¹

Before acclaiming him an empirical scientist, however, consider that his work is a reorganization of texts, not a report on new discoveries or botan­ical investigation into previously unknown material. His innovation was to create a formal structure that reallocated an unruly mass of texts. Nothing new is introduced, nothing that was not already part of a traditional tex­tual economy, making his work closer to Babylonian observation than to Dioscorides. Li travels into the countryside in order to question people living there, and try to find plants corresponding to names he knows from the huge corpus of texts he investigates, but he is really investigating texts, de­termining which to keep and which to reclassify as unverified.

A classic like the Book of Songs is the work of ancient sages, many sages, per­haps generations of sages, but men perceiving and feeling as we do. However much these works have been redacted, the poems began with somebody’s ex­perience and were constantly controlled by the experience of sage redactors, experience with which it is possible through study and ceremonial practice to establish continuity. Doing so is more valuable than finding out something new or advancing some problem of theoretical research. But is it empiri­cism? Confucians use experience artfully, and disavow innate ideas; know­ledge begins with experience, which is not just perception but selection and memory; and we are directed to extend knowledge through investigation. '1 hat should be a kind of empiricism, though these Confucians envision no use of artfully orchestrated experience to advance research problems. The in­vestigation of things is an ethical practice, a technics of self-cultivation, not an Organon, an instrument of knowledge. Extending and perfecting know­ledge means bringing the competence of individuals to perfection, making their knowledge sagacious, and not enhancing a corporate body of profes­sional knowledge like the Hippocratic techne.